BlogElul Day 3: Prepare

On the one hand, they appear to happen spontaneously – a bunch of friends have a neat topic idea, they grab a recording device, have an insightful conversation punctuated by witty banter, hit “save”, hit “post” and voila! Podcast achieved.

On the other hand, they clearly take up significant levels of time, energy, and even money to be done correctly.

So I thought it might be interesting to share the preparation we take here on Technically Religious to pull together an episode.

Lay the Foundation

Before you can even record episode 1, you need a place to host the podcast, equipment to record, software to record with, and more. When we first conceived of the idea of Technically Religious, we set up a few accounts:

web hosting through SiteGround

podcast hosting via PodBean

podcast recording via CAST

audio editing with Audacity

audio transcriptions using Temi

production planning with Trello

free images via Unsplash, Pexels, and/or Pixabay

realtime (or near-realtime communication with Slack

episode breakdowns via Google Docs

Everyone involved had to make sure they had decide recording equipment too. Some of us went off the deep end and went with the Yeti Snowball, and others showed some restraint and stuck with the headsets and mics they normally use for meetings and such.

Lights, Camera, Action!

With all of that in place, we were (and are) able to create each episode. The preparation looks something like this:

Roundtable discussions (usually via email or Slack) for topic ideas

Decide on which regular members will join in, solicit guests for the episode

Schedule the record for one of our standard slots (Sunday or Monday evening)

Set up a Google doc to jot down brainstorming ideas, etc.

30 min before the record, everyone jumps on a call to review the brainstorming, nail down the specific talking points, and talk through the episode so that everyone has a sense of where the conversation is headed.

If you’re read this far, and you are curious, it takes about 6-7 person-hours to produce a 30 minute, 3-voice episode. Since all of us have decades of IT experience, we were prepared for the level of work it was going to require.

But what none of us were prepared for was the level of interest, support, and – yes, I mean it – love that we get from the community.